Business Innovators Radio - Unleashing the Power of Automation in Business with Preston Brown

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

In this episode, Nina Hershberger talks with entrepreneur, Preston Brown, to discuss the importance of automation in business. Preston shares his personal journey of entrepreneurship, starting with his father’s struggles and how it shaped his own path. He emphasizes the need for entrepreneurs to understand the value of systems & automation and how it can transform their businesses.Preston has built and sold multiple successful businesses. He brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the conversation, making this episode a must-listen for anyone looking to take their business to the next level.Preston’s credentials and expertise in the field of automation are impressive. He has successfully automated his own companies, generating hundreds of millions in annual revenue. His unique approach to problem-solving and his ability to identify the right stage of entrepreneurship has made him a sought-after expert in the industry.During the interview, Preston breaks down the main points of his seven-stage entrepreneurship model. He explains how every entrepreneur is doing the right things, but at the wrong stage. By understanding the problems and solutions specific to each stage, entrepreneurs can achieve success more efficiently.This episode is a valuable resource for entrepreneurs at any stage of their journey. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to scale your business, Preston’s insights will provide the guidance and inspiration you need.If you’re interested in learning more about Preston Brown and his work, visit his website at www.theprestonbrown.com. There, you can access his free masterclass, which dives deeper into the seven stages of entrepreneurship. Additionally, you’ll find a wealth of resources and courses to further enhance your understanding of automation and business growth.Don’t miss out on this captivating episode as Preston Brown shares his wisdom and experience on unleashing the power of automation in business. Tune in now and take the first steps towards creating a more efficient and successful business.MegaBucks Radio with Nina Hershbergerhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/megabucks-radio-with-nina-hershbergerSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/unleashing-the-power-of-automation-in-business-with-preston-brown

Welcome to Megabox Radio. Conversations with successful entrepreneurs, sharing their tips and strategies for success, real-world ideas that can put Megabox in your bank account. Here's your host, Nina Hirshberger. Welcome to today's show. This is your host, Nina Hirshberger. And I am honored to have my guest today is Preston Brown. Now, Preston has a long history of entrepreneurship. One of his titles, I think, is so fascinating.

He calls himself a disruptive innovator. In fact, one of the quotes that I love about what he says is, if you can't optimize and automate your companies to step out, you don't have a business. You have a job. So welcome Preston to the day show. Thank you so much for having me, Nina. Such an honor.

It is an honor to have you. So let's go back in time. That's what I always do with all of my guests. I can read your bio, but it's more fun when you tell us your story, your journey. Where did you start? I think it was a pretty young age, wasn't it? Sure, yeah. My entrepreneur journey, probably like a lot of people's, and watching people I loved and respected.

Mine started with my dad. We grew up very poor. I lived in a little trailer park in Kenya, Tio, and he wanted the life that he was watching on TV. not the one we had. And he decided to open his own business. He was typical entrepreneur that really loved what he was doing, passionate about his product and his service, metallurgical engineer by trade,

but I'm not an entrepreneur by trade. He didn't understand certain things like billing and, you know, charging and collecting that are fairly critical, right? He just kept doing the servant-hearted thing and more work and more work. And, you know, when you're poor, money runs out a little quicker. And I remember my family growing up, we had tons of love. We didn't have a lot of money, but we had tons of love. And there was not fighting that we the kids ever saw until that day.

And, you know, one of those cast iron frying pans that you can use for literally everything goes flying across the room, like smacks into the wall, clanks to the floor. Mom had everyone's attention. And I don't remember all the words that were yelled. There were a lot, but I do remember a real man can feed his family. Go collect with your own or don't come back. And so being young, seven, eight years old, that created a ton of fear. I got through the charity piece. I went with dad, wrote up to a house not far from where I live now.

And here's my hero, my dad, this amazing guy, six foot four, like star football player on his football team, member of men, a huge, beautiful, amazing, brilliant man. And walks up to this guy all of about five foot nine, demands what he's owed like any man would. And the story didn't end the way you would expect that to. I mean, you could expect that my dad could kill this guy with a napkin, but it didn't go that way. It went more than the route of demanding, turn to asking, turn to, you know, hey man, look, I can't go home unless I collect. And it wound up with a lot of cash getting shoved out of this guy's wallet, far less to what he was owed. My dad and I rode down to the local Smith, Albertsons now.

And I rode back with a box of ramen noodles on my lap, and my dad not answered. answering my questions as I was trying to underwrite what went on. He shut down his business the next day, got a job, and, you know, overall he was fine in life, but there was something impactful that happened. I learned at seven or eight years old that love was not the meaning of life, as I previously understood it. It was money. And I became this corporate machine. Like, if you thought Donald Trump was a jerk or an a-hole, you'd have hated me.

I could, you know, browbeat him on the toxic narcissist. side of things. And I built some fairly large companies and I became monetarily very successful. I healed the wound daddy had. And in 2019, the worst day and the best day of my life happened. The man that taught me that money was the meaning of life, sat down in his favorite chair and went to sleep and didn't wake up. I got a big lesson about what really was the meaning of life. And I hated him and I hated myself for not spending time with him, hated him for leaving, It had God partaken him, had to go re-underite life again. And it was this beautiful bringing you back to love is the meaning of life,

because I would have traded it all 10 times over just for a minute more with them. And now I've got automated companies and hundreds of millions annually in revenue. And, you know, I've got the life of dreams, beautiful life, amazing kids who now I actually spent time with back then I didn't. And I want to help other people not make the same mistakes for as long as I did. Yeah, that's the fascinating part, is that automation, is the ability to have those businesses and not have the businesses own you, if I'm saying what you would say right. So how do you do that? Do you have a five-step program, Preston, or what do you do?

I don't really have a program. I actually built a mastermind before, and I recently sold it and got rid of it because I'm not much of what I'd say you'd call it coach. I don't, I don't, I'm a little bit too automated for that, I think, but I have developed, and anyone can go to my website and download it. I have seven stages to entrepreneurship. Almost every entrepreneur is doing the right thing. They're just doing it at the wrong stage of entrepreneurship.

It's no different than, you know, when you're growing up, like, you don't have to worry about changing your 15-year-old's diapers, but when they're two years old, it could be a very meaningful thing. And you don't get to schedule when. They're going to let you know when the schedule is. It's a lot like a startup. So the problems that a startup's having is not going to be the same as the problems that a megapreneur is having. I don't care which guru told you to go buy a jet. And so I've dialed businesses into seven different stages. And at every step, I've found problems that are isolated out that when you solve them, you can go in and create success. I mean, I'll give you the hack and the secret. It's so simple. But,

The steps, once you find the simple secret, are a little less simple, and you have to build formulas and frameworks to it. So the way I built the seven stages was I started realizing that every time I had a problem, there was an underlying gift. And I realized that learning was the single greatest tool that any human has. It's not the hammer. It's not the wheel. It's not fire. It's not any AI software. That'll never replace.

I am. And the ability to learn. And, you know, most people, they spend so much time trying to protect their own emotions and protect the emotions of them around them, of those around them, that they don't get to the actual truth. And when you dive into the truth and you actually allow that almost biblical iron sharpens iron to come and challenge you at every stage, you actually find out, oh, wow, I'm walking in the right direction, or I'm not, and that's okay because if I can identify the problem,

I can solve it. So with my seven stages where I identified the problems at each seven, I also created a problem-solving formula with the goal being efficiency. Broken down into three stages, there's alignment, simplicity, and foresight. Those are the three things that make up efficiency. To get to where those are measurable, you can measure culture, clarity, capacity, and cash. Those are like legs on a table. If one's not the same length, the table will be wonky.

And you can adjust the length and strength of the legs by adjusting only six things. A business is sort of like driving a car. I mean, you have a steering wheel, you have a gas and a brake pedal. you know, only a business is different. Your dials are price, product, people, place, promotion, and process. And if you're focusing on the four Cs and the three goals to efficiency, and you know which stage you're in, anyone can be successful. Give me some examples.

Some real life examples, how that all plays in. So I'll give you an example, but let me do it in the form of kind of looking back in history with myself, right? I bought a failing company, and the company was so rough that I was actually paid to take. It's one of my larger companies today. It's production home building. It's called Cia Homes in El Paso. Okay. And when I took over the company, terrible reviews, they were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to their trades.

I'd actually go borrow some money to catch up the payments of the trades. The reviews were bad. The reputation was terrible. This business, although it had a big brand, not a good brand, but a big brand because it's been in business for many years, years had been run into the ground. That company, when I took it over, was basically a startup. Okay. I took over a company with one secretary, one foreman, 30 homes under construction, and they owed a lot of money that they couldn't pay. That company, when I went to start getting it selling, okay, and growing, I had to look at, well, how do I accomplish this? And I had to clean

out all the bad actors, go away from startup, which is where you're in this race for cash. You're trying to figure out, how do I find out how to make my product meet the market needs? No business serves a customer. The market serves the customer. And the market has several major player businesses that have unique niches that the customers tend to prefer. And so I went out and I went all over the country studying the best home builders and the best niches they met, designed my product, my service, and my systems to that, hired people that

were already in alignment with that culture, not from my industry, because it didn't exist in my industry. I actually had to get employees from places like Chick-fil-A and other places that were not in my industry that aligned with the culture of the organization I wanted to build and train them into what I was doing. I only kept one employee, and when we went from spectator sport, which was basically me and the one employee I kept to Team Sport, where we started, here's your job description, not a 20-page job description, but 10 items, the critical things I pay you for. I will grade you on these 10 items at 10 points each every month. 70, no different than grade school, is a passing grade, but not a great grade.

We want you at a 90 or 100. So every month there will be an improvement program. Over time, you can develop leadership. we had to solve the brand issue by creating a formula for marketing. But, I mean, there's several examples in one. I mean, let me pause and see if you have questions there, and we can go into as many different examples as you need. Yeah, no, I love this real-life example

because that's helping to make sense of what it is you do. So I think we're good. Go ahead. So then all of a sudden we have this relatively automated business from the back office, but we don't have a brand, right? Or if we do have a brand, it's of a company that we bought that has had a history of not honoring its warranty, pissing off the real estate agents, not doing great by the buyers after they close. So let's say a one-star review is probably a good review, and we were flooded with ones, okay? And any fives that were there probably looked fake from years ago when they tried to do some brand management and failed miserably.

And so while I had now no longer 30 products under construction, I had 60 or 80, and now, I think today we're 250, 300 products that were built. at any one time. But at that point, that business was big enough that I had enough debt, that I was already a millionaire, but now I had millions in debt and nobody that wanted to buy my homes. I had nicer amenities. I had lower prices. I had great systems. We were building on time, but I had to overcome brand because I had scaled the team, the company, the systems, into what's called this operational megapreneur stage, but I couldn't get the customers to buy in because of a past brand. So I had to come up with a marketing grading scale.

And this is where at every different stage, you have to look at the problems you have, study the problems, and develop solutions around that. So in my marketing grading scale, I was literally probably three months from bankruptcy, which you're in business, you know, that's three months from,

God knows what else. Could be divorce, could be anything else. Entrepreneurs' worst nightmare, right? And so while I'm, and do you mind a slightly controversial but good story on this one? No, go ahead. So as I'm sitting here,

I'm thinking, man, I've got all these houses. The customer does come inside the house. It sells. But when I can see the customers outside because it's a model home complex, little model homes of all the different competitors all around me, the realtors would drag them away from mine. So I was like, how do I get them to come inside the home? And so I wrote down, that's what I want, because the brand and call to action first.

I just want them to come inside the home. What influences them? What influences these customers and these realtors? I have a bad brand. I can't get away from it. It's been developed before I even got the company. Building a startup would be easier than this thing. And I started thinking what influences people is what already influences them.

And that's true throughout psychology and history. And if you look at humans, people love talking about several things. We all know sex cells, so sex appeals one. Current events is another. We're all talking about the same news media, right? Controversy. Love them or hate them. Donald Trump got elected and maybe unelected because of controversy.

So you can go too far. So you have Brandon calls action, controversy, current events, sex appeal, and the life. Last one. Maybe the most important. Human emotions. These are five things. I gave four of them, 20 points, and I gave branding call to action, 30 points, a total of 110 points. And for whatever reason, it hit me like, well, if you get extra credit, 110 points, maybe you go viral. And a gal and a pretty red dress came and stood outside of one of my models, three months from bankruptcy, and she took a picture of my gorgeous home, sitting next to homes with far less amenities, far less everything that nobody wanted to walk into.

And this was during the Jeffrey Epstein time. It was all over the news in, you know, I think 2018-19 timeframe. And she had an A-frame sign there, very prominent in the picture, and it said, in plain English, our call to action, come inside me. Now, we didn't spell it wrong. We spelled it absolutely right. You know, we did not say anything vulgar. We just wanted them to come inside the home. But we did not realize or think.

of how much backlash we were going to get. We pissed off a lot of people, and we made a lot of people laugh. People thought it was hilarious. We got 40,000 views in an hour. I don't recommend going this direct or this intentional in any marketing journey, unless you're literally about to fail. But we sold six homes the next day. We created more of the fun, playful brand.

Now we make jokes, be the sexy neighbor, and size does matter because we build bigger homes. We don't go quite as extreme as we did then, but we save the company. We're now one of the top builders in our market, and we have the highest margins of any builder in our market. Because people want to play. They want to be part of a tribe. They want to be part of a brand. They want to laugh.

They want to smile. People when they walk in our model homes, people will say, can I give you the authentic, fun, playful sales pitch? Or should I go through and give you the politically correct, boring one? You know what nobody asks for? The politically correct boring one. Boring one. We even go as extreme as using reverse marketing, reverse marketing to push away the customers that are not your niche.

We now still have an A-frame outside of our home. And it says, we reserve the right to refuse service to assholes. And yes, that triggers some people, and those are the ones we don't want. When people walk in and say, I'm offended, we say, this is probably not your product. When people are like, that's a funny sign, we're like, welcome, brother. And that's one piece that we've used for marketing and scaling. We use gradable job descriptions which link to KPI's for measuring. You cannot manage what you cannot measure.

What I've found in every single stage of entrepreneurship is that, and this is maybe something for all of your clients to think on, and it's such a simple concept, but people don't have it today. What is the difference, and I'll challenge you really because it's fun. What is the difference between protecting someone from the truth and protecting the truth from someone. Oh, I'm going to let you answer that. Isn't that profound?

Let me share it. It's so profound. The truth will always set you free. When you protect somebody from the truth, my wife's a beautiful lady. But if she gets a dress I don't like and she puts it on, do you think this dress makes me look fat? I'm never going to say yes because I love my wife. So when I protect somebody from the truth, I don't want to hurt their emotions. but when I protect the truth from somebody,

I'm preventing them from learning what they need to know to advance. And when you're in business, iron sharpens iron, it's a blood sport. You're 365 days a year, seven days a week, 24 hours a day where your competitors want your market ship, and you want theirs. And you don't serve the customer the market does. And the market will replace you if you're not the best. So the goal is to be the best. How do I automate? How do I build an incredible culture?

Why do we call it culture? Is the first four letters of the word culture cult? Hmm. If it is cult, isn't cult a bad word? Well, it can be, but it can also be a beautiful one. If you have an identity, and your identity is who you get to be, but also who you have to be, your culture is who your company gets to be, but also who it has to be. And you can create formulas for behavioral moderation and creating beautiful cultures,

which are going to emanate from the owner out through your entire staff and even your customers, which will create regenerative growth models in both your demand and your operations. I mean, there's so many little pieces that we'll never get to on a short podcast, but they're fun, and everyone can be free, everyone can be rich.

In fact, I think, you know, if you're getting into business because you're passionate about doing what you love, you have an ethical obligation to take that to the next level and become rich so that you can set other people free by them following your example. So Preston, let's go back when you were telling the story about your father, and then you started businesses and you became, I don't know if you said you were an a-hole, asshole or anything.

Oh, I was a big shit. What switched then? Tell me about switch. Well, I think what switched is I saw my dad. I saw my hero get taken advantage of. And I never wanted that for him, but certainly I didn't want that for me. and I was scared. You know, we, we entrepreneurs, we don't understand the identity around the word fear, right?

Even though it's one of the most prominent emotions. And I didn't want to ever be walked on like him. I saw my hero get disrespected by a man for money. And I didn't care if I had to be hated, feared, or loved. I didn't want somebody to be able to use money as a tool to influence me. And so through my own fear, it became exactly that, just in an indirect way. You know, not to push religion here, but there's an interesting verse in the Bible. It says, the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord.

Oh, that's a very interesting verse. I mean, us entrepreneurs, we love the hats that say no fear. We all say, fear is false evidence appearing real. Well, I had an unreasonable fear, right? And so I let that drive my behavior. All human beings, even the most mean people out there, they're looking for love. they're looking to feel important. They're looking to feel special.

Love is truly the meaning of life. But in the absence of love, fear always exists. And so when I saw my dad lose love, lose his dreams, give up on a portion of his dreams where he thought, oh, I'm not enough. That drove me not just a fear for what that meant for him, but fear for what that meant for me. And I had to go get the thing that I perceived was taken from him.

And, yeah, I was very corporate and cutthroat and transactional. but at my core I was a love bug. I was doing it to protect. I was doing it with, if you want, a protection energy. And when I lost him, my dad was my greatest teacher. He taught me how to be productive and he taught me how to be transactional. But he also healed me from that by leaving.

When he went home, he showed me that, yes, well, the transfer of action is the foundation of all human society. It's how we connect. It's, you know, if I want to create a magical moment for my wife, I must transfer action to do something, whether it's conditional love or unconditional love. I must still transact to make her feel special. And the purpose of transaction, when driven by fear, will always lead you to just a transaction for the transaction's sake. When driven by love, it drives other people to you.

It took me losing love to find it again. You can't get lost or you can't get found unless you've been lost. And so, yeah, I was probably a terrible husband and a crap father and a very good businessman. And what's interesting is in 2019, when he left, since that time, I went from well-to-do, probably worth, you know, maybe $5 to $10 million to now I have companies that do individually over $100 million in revenue and with significant margins. But I had to go through that pain journey. And everybody does. Like, you're not going to get away from it.

but I highly recommend do it faster, which be the abject learner. A lot of people think that religion is a great way of avoiding hell. Well, there's this beautiful spirituality to business. And, you know, I think that spirituality is going to hell, conquering it, and coming back victorious. I just think people should do it faster so they can truly have that life of their dreams, the one they see on TV. not the one that they're watching, but the one that they're living. So do you think anybody can be an entrepreneur? No, I think everybody can be an entrepreneur.

I mean, there's many different types of people I've worked with, and I've formed a company called Your Best Life, and I worked with tons of different types of entrepreneurs, very organized, sophisticated, meticulous, detail-oriented people that you would have probably imagined to being an employee in accounting department. And I've worked with the very salesy, flamboyant people that you would imagine being, you know, that sales guy that probably can't keep their underwear drawer organized, right? And everyone can succeed.

Entrepreneurship is a team sport, not a spectator sport. It's all about finding the right people to complement your talents, building in the right processes to arrange the people and their roles together, buying into the mission, vision values of the entity and the organization and the problem you solved. every sale is a solution to a customer's problem. So if you are going to protect your customer from the truth, then you're not going to tell them about their problems. And if you don't tell them about their problems and be radically authentic, how are you ever going to help them solve them?

Well, you know, these days, I hear it over and over and over from business owners, entrepreneurs, how difficult it is to find employees these days. Well, obviously, yeah, so tell me what you're doing about that. So everything's a market, okay? And it's not difficult to find the employee. It's difficult to access the market. The market is changing far more frequently than it used to. The market is a foundation that we all ride.

Your business is like a surfboard. The market is a wave. to insist that the wave stay constant is irrational and unreasonable. To state, hey, you know, I'm going to surf this wave is reasonable, but then I better underwrite which direction the wave is going in. And so it's not hard to find employees. It's hard to find employees at the pay rate that you had them at yesterday. It's hard to afford employees and make sure that their productivity pays for the higher salary

that they're now demanding. You need to know exactly what. that competent employee is worth. And that worth has changed substantially. I mean, how much inflation have we had if we were to combine it all of the last four years? 30%, 40%, depending on your industry? I mean, when they talk about, oh, 9% year over year, that the government's going to say, oh, yeah, well, we had 9% at its peak year over year, I think, last June or July, right?

Well, that's on government CPI and PPI metrics, which are highly manipulated. You can't expect a person whose paycheck is directly relevant to their lifestyle needs in their eyes to work for the same money that they would have worked for a few years ago. You need to have the ability to make them more efficient, build out processes, roles, and systems that allows them to focus on the main things, not the ancillary things that generate value to you in your firm. that way you can pay more than any of your competitors. My business's goals are always simple. I want to be able to spend more on marketing, more on payroll, have a better product, and the key for every business to do these things is always efficiency. If I have the most efficient company, then your company might be staffed with 80 people.

I can staff with 40 higher paid people, and thus I will get the best people. You know, in the old days, and this is just a fun antidote that let me throw in with it. the oil companies and the auto companies realized, wow, all these workers in Detroit, Michigan are less motivated than these farm boys that we get. They had that one farm boy that could do the same work as three or four workers in Detroit. So they'd open their plants in small towns and hire all the farm boys. We'd pay them more than mom and dad to work the farm. And they'd get 3, 4X the workload.

They created an efficiency technology. We think technology means AI or something. something else. It does not. It means something that you've improved over your competitors. They created a technology in finding the right target customer to work for them. Your customer is not just who buys. Your customer is anyone who has a financial transaction with your machine. It could be your employee, your vendor, your lender, your trade. And so you don't have a hard time finding employees. You just need to align your business to the market. A lot of your customers that are probably listening to your program,

would guess are operational entrepreneur, they're chasing that six-figure or maybe the low seven-figure market. They're trying to maintain their pricing. They're trying to keep competitive. They're trying to do all these things because they hear the feedback from their customers that are mad about inflation. Yet, if you go look at some of their competitors that are in the Wall Street bracket and the higher-end companies, their prices are escalating much faster than most of the smaller entrepreneurs, meaning they're going to have the higher margin to pay the better people. You never want to miss out on a 10. if you get a 10 out of 10 employee, you must hire them. They will find a way to make you afford them very quickly.

You just need a good system for rooting out the ones, two, sixes. You can train a seven to be a nine. Okay, so explain that kind of system. Well, how do I go over two hours worth of content on this call? Let me see. Can I, hmm, I'm going to give you an example. That will probably help, but since it's, you know, radio and audio, I want to paint a picture. So I'm going to give everyone in your audience a hack.

Sit down with a friend. And, you know, do this with somebody today. Sit down with a friend and say, I'll play, you be the friend. And you could just imagine that we were sitting here together looking across from one another, watching. You know, what did you have for breakfast two days ago? Boatmeal. Boatmeal. Now, invariably, you had to think about that, even if it was for half a second.

Your face did something, your eyes did something, your shoulders did something, you had a little movement in your body language or your tone or whatever that could be identified because I asked you a question, zero threat to get a baseline. Then, if I just take another question, okay, and I say, what type of men are you attracted to? all of a sudden this question implies a threat. If you do anything other than the baseline I gave you immediately, you're no longer accessing the side of your brain that's referencing information with no risk. Now you're accessing a different side of your information. You're going to the creativity side.

And so you need to, in your interviews, build a baseline, have some small talk, get to know the person and their patterns. From there, go through and ask direct business relevant questions, and you'll figure out where they'll be. being creative, where are they not? Every job interview is a poker game. We're looking for authenticity. We're looking for the employee's ability and willingness to learn.

If I have an employee that can learn, that is open, that is authentic, even when under challenge, even when under stress, this is a person that you can build into a captain of industry. My CEO for all of my companies was the secretary that I brought on from Zia Holmes. She now runs all of my companies, but she had one gift that, nobody I've ever interviewed had. The ability to overcome her fear and learn no matter what. I've now got three or four of these folks. I just wish I had more CEO positions.

But they run my businesses, and they're amazing because we're able to identify in our interview process, their authenticity and their ability to learn. My favorite interview question is, what's your favorite cuss word? That's my favorite interview question. Now, very rarely, we'll get somebody that's like, I will never cuss. Okay, well, that's maybe true in a very small subset of people. But for most people, if the worst thing in the world happened, a car rack happened, something else happened, they're going to drop something. And I want to see if they'll be honest.

A job interview is like a poker game. They're not going to show you their cards. They're there for the job. When you find the one that will, they can also learn, that can critic, think that did their research before they came in, now you're getting to hiring sevens and tens. If you can hire sevens and tens and build the framework for what you want them to do, almost every job is just a checklist of things that need to happen.

And if you want to build an amazing team, you need to have the right people with the right skill to learn that aligns to their nature. I mean, you can use disk tests, you can use all sorts of other tests to figure out behavioral natures. But that authenticity and that willingness and ability to learn is the key components of developing an amazing staff. And then when you bring your mission and they accept it as theirs, this is no longer a company. This becomes a movement and a mission where everybody is focused on the outcome. And many hands make light work. Many hands, but you have less hands than your competition because they're more efficient. Is that probably makes sense?

Absolutely true. But if I get a 10, even if I don't need them, I will hire them because I can build something around that person. What is an entrepreneur? An entrepreneur is a creator, right? It says in a good book, I made you in my image. Not I earned you. He didn't say go out and earn. He said, go out and create. An entrepreneur is a creator. So when you get a 10, you can build them into anything. And let me give you another hack for all your entrepreneurs. There's this thing called capacity, right? You could also call it throughput. Like, you need to get leads, you need to turn the leads into sales, you need to turn the sales into you delivering upon what you promised in your sales process, and then you need to turn the delivery into cash. There's four flows of what we call this throughput process in what I call capacity. An entrepreneur can work in all four.

This is the first thing I look in. When I dive into a business, I've had several folks reach out and help me with a business, we built a little social media brand and all of a sudden, and people were like, I want to happen my business. People were struggling. And I charge $50 grand up front, and then I go out there, and I audit their company. And when I audit their company, I offer them at the end, look, I'll give you your $50,000 back, and I'll take a stake. Or I'll keep your $50,000 if I don't want a stake in the company, because I don't identify that we're a good bit, right?

The first thing I look for is that an owner can work in all four, but an employee can never work in more than two. consecutive areas. An employee can work in leads and sales. An employee can work in sales and delivery. An employee can work in delivery in cash. This information is all out there. It's all free all over my social media. People can have it.

But in every company I've worked in, whether they had 100 people, I think the largest was like 300 people, or three people. They've all had people in too many of the flows of capacity. The employee does not have the risk or the reward that people, owner has and thus they cannot have the motivation that the owner has but us

entrepreneurs we all believe in what's possible and we want to make everybody like us and some people just don't want to be they want to be part of a great mission have a fulfilling role work in a great culture and so you have to understand where the team begins and ends yes you want to always hire tens yes you want to have a more efficient team where it's smaller than your competitor's team, but more productive than your competitor's team in most situations. I mean, there's no absolutes, not all businesses or all industries are exactly alike. Sometimes you do want more, but there's reasons for it, which we can go into in a separate time if you'd like.

But then you have to understand people's limitations. You have to look at the human needs of the employee. I've got a document that I give out freely to everyone, and it's the 10 human needs of an employee. your employee is going to go spend what, eight to 12 hours working with you and three to five hours maybe with their family of compelling time. They're going to give you more time in their own family. I think you have an ethical obligation to make sure you're meeting their needs at the highest level, so you're making that time compelling. They should be a part of your mission. They should love it.

If love is the meaning of life, we should have it in business just like we do in our marriage, not in the same ways. Well, Preston, this has been fascinating. I'm looking at the clock, and we are almost out of time. I have one last question, though. Can you speak just a moment on automation? Define what that means to you. So a business is a vehicle. It's a vehicle to get you to your goals and dreams.

Any vehicle that you drive today has a certain amount of automation. A bicycle has far less than a, you know, Ferrari. That Ferrari, which is what I think most entrepreneurs' goal business would be, that the barari, not the hand crank or the pedal bicycle, requires far less work. All you have to do is push the gas and aim the direction, right? And so a vehicle has automation. You can get anywhere walking with your Chevrolegs,

but you're going to go much faster with an, automated machine. And so at every stage of a business's development, you need to look at what is taking away from the possibility of automating that area, automating that system, automating your throughput. So automation is nothing more than turning an idea, a concept, a solution of a problem into a team sport where you have systems, processes, product promotion, you know, and the right people to make it happen in a regenerative manner. Yeah, that's a great definition. Well, Preston, a second ago, you said there was an offer that you would make.

So I'm sure the people that are listening to this would love to have that document you talked about. How could they get a hold of that? If they go to my website, I have a free master class. So when I built my mastermind, which I recently gave away and sold to partners and mentors that were still running it because I didn't want to do all the coaching. I'm enjoying focusing on my business, but I got to coach. I coached four billionaires, several Deca and sent to millionaires, and about a hundred different folks in this amazing company called YBL. And I'm a bit of a nerd, Nina. So I logged every coaching session.

And I found that all of the coaching sessions, not all, not all, 90s. 88% of them fit into 15 categories of pain that people were in. But then I realized, well, not everybody has the same learning system. So whether they want to go through my process or any other, I would say go to my website, www. thepressdenbrown.com and get my masterclass. That masterclass is free. It'll take you through the seven stages.

It'll explain what you need to learn in each stage and the process. problems you solve in each stage, and it'll give you a formula, a filter formula, where you can take problems and get closer to them, fully understand them, and once you understand a problem, you generally have a better solution than any competitor. That masterclass will set a huge percentage of entrepreneurs that just watch that free, and for anybody that wants more, we'll have all of the courses, like all the 15 different things available. I think it's like you can spend $1,000 and get all of them or buy them one at a time for

200 each or something like that. Well, that's very generous. I appreciate that offer. So again, go to www. Thepressonbrown.com. So Preston, thank you so much for being on a show. So fascinating, so interesting. I know I'm certainly going to go and check out those masterclasses.

Well, I appreciate you having me on. And, you know, just reading through everything you're doing and helping people tell stories and helping people get their message out there, it's an honor to be able to collaborate with you. Well, my pleasure and an honor for you, too. Honor for me with that. So until next time, this is Niner Hirshberger saying go to www. The Preston Brown.com.

Until next time. Thank you for listening to Megabucks Radio with Nina Hirshberger. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or to listen to past episodes. Visit megabucksradio.com.